Zombie Posted January 12, 2009 Report Share Posted January 12, 2009 I just downloaded Firefox 3 this afternoon. Here are my impressions: 1) It's a resource hog, plain and simple. Obviously it's optimized to run on Vista machines where resources need to be higher anyway. No lockups so far, but thankfully I recently upgraded my memory to 1GB which helps. 2) Going to take some time to get used to the forward and back buttons jammed together. The shared multi-jump thing-a-ma-jobber is a little backwards, but still functional. 3) Downloading files is like 1000x faster than before. Really. It's a marked improvement. MB-sized files now take seconds instead of a minute to complete. Haven't tried video files yet, but pictures are much faster than before. I'm still deciding on what I want to do. On one hand, the resource hogging is a concern. On the other, downloads are improved. Might go so far as to use Firefox only for downloading and use a archaic browser like Netscape Navigator for normal everyday web visits. - Zombie Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
FullAuto Posted January 12, 2009 Report Share Posted January 12, 2009 Mine's been crashing an awful lot recently... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Slaughter Posted January 13, 2009 Report Share Posted January 13, 2009 ... I'm still deciding on what I want to do. On one hand, the resource hogging is a concern. On the other, downloads are improved. Might go so far as to use Firefox only for downloading and use a archaic browser like Netscape Navigator for normal everyday web visits. - ZombieEver heard of Opera? It's superior to both... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Zombie Posted January 14, 2009 Report Share Posted January 14, 2009 Sure, I've heard of it. In fact, I have it. But my idea behind browsers is this: if nobody is using a browser, then it is more secure since hackers aren't going to waste their time on it, no? Granted, Opera isn't as popular as IE or Firefox, but a really old version of NN is probably the least used of anything out there. Correct me if my logic isn't sound. - Zombie Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pete Posted January 14, 2009 Report Share Posted January 14, 2009 No! Not Nutscrape Navigator! Don't do it! Seriously though, I'd be impressed if Netscape managed to even render half of today's web pages. Besides that, it's so old you'd be open to so many security issues. @Slaughter - if I didn't need the Firefox add-ons I have that make building websites so much easier, I probably would use Opera. Or Chrome. Just can't live without Firebug, Colour Picker, Measure-It, TimeStamp Converter, XE.com currency Converter and Window Resizer as a web designer/developer though unfortunately (well I could, but things would take a hell of a lot longer ). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Slaughter Posted January 14, 2009 Report Share Posted January 14, 2009 @Zombie: I agree with Pete. Old browsers will have security holes regardless of few crackers focusing on them. All browsers execute scripts and so on, and they can hit for instance Netscape as hard as they hit IE. In browsers like Opera and FF you can stop script execution and so on to make them EVEN more secure. @Pete: I see your point, but with Opera Widgets and Plugins you can probably get some of the functionality in Opera as well. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
zaimoni Posted January 15, 2009 Report Share Posted January 15, 2009 Sure, I've heard of it. In fact, I have it. But my idea behind browsers is this: if nobody is using a browser, then it is more secure since hackers aren't going to waste their time on it, no? Granted, Opera isn't as popular as IE or Firefox, but a really old version of NN is probably the least used of anything out there. Correct me if my logic isn't sound. - ZombieWhile I do not use this technique (I use tabbed browsing very heavily), one of my friends does. NS 4.76 breaks so much modern JavaScript that it is reasonably safe (completely non-standard DOM), except against "insecure by design" standards. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Zombie Posted January 17, 2009 Report Share Posted January 17, 2009 While I do not use this technique (I use tabbed browsing very heavily), one of my friends does. NS 4.76 breaks so much modern JavaScript that it is reasonably safe (completely non-standard DOM), except against "insecure by design" standards.Hehe, just as a test I downloaded 3.02 gold. The first page I tried to load came up with a ton of javascript errors and then the browser locked up. So v3.x isn't too good. I'll try v4.x sometime to see if that fares any better. - Zombie Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bomb Bloke Posted February 11, 2009 Report Share Posted February 11, 2009 Mostly because of what Az wrote, I'd put my Firefox 3 update on indefinite hiatus. About a month or so ago I finally received a message stating that version 2 would henceforth be unsupported, and they'd be no more patches for it. Since then I'd been receiving "upgrade to 3" messages instead. Although there was an option to stop them appearing, I just kept hitting the "bug me later" button on the basis that eventually I'd feel like doing it... The inevitable happened, I went to click on something else, the upgrade window magically appeared in front of my cursor at that instant, and the relevant button got pressed. Next time I fired up the browser I was running v3. Took me half a day to work it out (when I went to hit the back button). Anyway! Overall, speed seems to have improved a little bit. Seems to take much less time to pull itself out of virtual memory (which is where Windows likes to put things if you don't use them for a while, EVEN IF it's got free RAM coming out it's ears). It seems to use a little more RAM then before, but only just. Say about 10mb? Mind you, the total figure slowly crawls up day by day (just as I don't shut my computer off if I can avoid it, I tend to leave my web browser open as well). For example, it's currently sitting on 115mb, but again, the old version climbed up in the same way. "Open all in tabs" from the Favourites menu used to close all currently opened tabs then open all the favourites in the group I'd selected instead. Now it leaves all the current tabs open except for whatever tab you were currently viewing. An annoying compromise which only adds to the amount of clicks I have to make. I can no longer bring up properties for file downloads. The option just isn't there. I can "copy the URL to clipboard", but I can no longer get at the URL of the actual file (for example, if I orginally clicked a PHP link which redirected me to the file, trying to get the file URL from the downloads list instead gives me the PHP link I clicked). The main reason I do this is so I could copy links into GetRight, which supports download resuming (Firefox 2 did not). However, prior work with other computers makes me think Firefox 3 supports resuming on it's own. Dunno how well it does it though, haven't tested it on my own machine yet. Experience will tell. "Recently closed tabs" still gets cleared every time I close the browser. For who knows what reason I can't right click things in the History menu (in order to open them in a new tab). Telling Firefox 3 to save a picture from a web page just about always results in it downloading the file - Even if it should already have the thing locally cached due to having just displayed it. Haven't yet tested to see how this effects the ability of the DownloadHelper extension I use to rip FLV files. I'll be pissed if it decides to re-download those. The "show image" context menu item is nice to have at last. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gimli Posted February 11, 2009 Author Report Share Posted February 11, 2009 I think it's not a problem with Downloadhelper, but I haven't used it in a long time. For the tabs, use TabMixPlus, it's an excellent extension I just can't live without. And for the downloads I use Download Statusbar. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Matri Posted February 11, 2009 Report Share Posted February 11, 2009 Use the DownThemAll! extension for a download manager. Supports resuming, MD1, MD5 and SHA hashes, plus automatic segmenting. And try clicking the middle mouse button. That tells Firefox to open whatever link you are middle-clicking into a new tab. Even works on the Home & Back/Forward buttons. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bomb Bloke Posted March 9, 2009 Report Share Posted March 9, 2009 I haven't posted here 'cause I felt guilty about not getting around to testing those extensions yet, but what the heck. It's getting tricky to keep track of all my new whinges. Middle button doesn't seem to work for me. Maybe my mouse is broken. Though that did remind me I can just hold Ctrl for much the same effect, though. Still not sure why the menu doesn't work in History, surely there's no good reason to disable it? I googled around a bit re the "re-download everything under the sun" issue. Some guys noticed that clearing the browser cache might fix it. Didn't work for me though. Seems to have come right on it's own however, so I assume a browser patch dealt with it (I'd found the bug mentioned in their tracker system, so I can only assume so). The download manager thingy is still saving some files "half done" if for whatever reason the transfer cuts out half way. A bug which has been annoying the hell out of me is, whenever I go to save something, if I click on a folder in the save dialog thingy the browser will freeze for a fraction of a second. So if I double-click (to open it, which is of course the reason I was clicking in the first place), chances are the browser won't catch the second mouse press, only the first. So here I am, sitting there... I can see the folder name has been highlighted, but is the browser gonna open the folder in the next few seconds? Should I sit there like a dummy waiting for something that might not happen, or should I double click again? The problem with the later option is that sometimes the browser DID catch that second click, and if I double click again, the folder will suddenly pop open and it'll then attempt to save over whatever random file happens to appear where the mouse cursor was. Aggravation either way. Another gripe is the way it handles shortcut files. I've got the Java dev kit docs on my HDD (they're all in HTML format, pages generated directly from the source code that makes up the functions they cover. Clever stuff). So, to make this stuff easily accessible, I just created a shortcut in one of my project folders leading to the documentation. Under Firefox 3, this is broken as hell. When you double click the shortcut, the browser will correctly load the HTML file it points to, but assume that the file is in the same folder as the shortcut. Hence all the relative links are broken and the whole thing's unbrowsable. The only solution is to actually mess about with Windows Explorer, hunt down the documentation I've got buried deep within my Program Files folder, and open it from there. It's madness, and I can't for the life of me work out why they've changed it to act in this manner. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Matri Posted March 10, 2009 Report Share Posted March 10, 2009 Try a re-install. Download the latest distributable and just re-install it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kizmiaz Posted March 21, 2009 Report Share Posted March 21, 2009 This had me tempted to convert to Firefox... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gimli Posted March 21, 2009 Author Report Share Posted March 21, 2009 That was pretty funny. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bomb Bloke Posted April 6, 2009 Report Share Posted April 6, 2009 Aha! I've discovered something. If I close the browser down about once per day (as opposed to leaving it open for weeks on end), many of the speed issues seem to go away. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
FullAuto Posted May 2, 2009 Report Share Posted May 2, 2009 No FF tabs in future? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
FullAuto Posted June 30, 2009 Report Share Posted June 30, 2009 Firefox 3.5 is a bit chunkier. Let's hope it's more stable, too. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bomb Bloke Posted July 1, 2009 Report Share Posted July 1, 2009 Stability I've got. I want it to stop eating my RAM/CPU time... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Azrael Strife Posted July 1, 2009 Report Share Posted July 1, 2009 I'm afraid we'll have to wait for FF 4 for that, the FF 3 codebase is a memory hog.At least it's faster than FF3. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
FullAuto Posted July 26, 2009 Report Share Posted July 26, 2009 Just started using the Down Them All addon, nifty little thing. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Azrael Strife Posted July 26, 2009 Report Share Posted July 26, 2009 Yup it's really great, one of the main reasons I still use FF from time to time, despite 3.5 still sucking.Once Chrome gets extensions, it won't matter Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Matri Posted July 26, 2009 Report Share Posted July 26, 2009 Just started using the Down Them All addon, nifty little thing.What took you so long? I've been using it for about 3 years now. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
FullAuto Posted July 30, 2009 Report Share Posted July 30, 2009 You enjoy making me cry, don't you. NoScript is another good one, although it does exactly what it says, which can come as a surprise on some pages. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Slaughter Posted July 31, 2009 Report Share Posted July 31, 2009 "Back is close" is another one I like. When you go back, and there's no more room to go back, it closes the tab instead. May not be to everyone's taste, but I like it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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